Arts|Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, a Mother-Daughter Act for the Ages

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Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, a Mother-Daughter Act for the Ages

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Susan Dominus looks back at the complicated and close relationship between Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, two Hollywood icons whose deaths were a day apart.CreditCreditKevin Scanlon for The New York Times

For anyone who loves the spotlight, mothering can be an ideal role — for a while. The mother is a singular star to her baby, whose gaze follows her around the room with the watchfulness of an obsessive fan. For the stars Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, that dynamic seemed to linger well into Ms. Fisher’s childhood: Ms. Fisher was the reverent observer, her mother the adored and observed.

“When my mother was at home on weekends, we stayed with her as much as possible, which frequently meant we were very involved in watching our mother,” wrote Ms. Fisher in her memoir “Wishful Drinking,” including her brother, Todd Fisher, in her recollections. Sometimes, they watched her sleep; often, they watched their mother transform into someone “not of this world,” a trick carried off with makeup and glitter and silk. “When our mother dressed,” Ms. Fisher wrote, “the man behind the curtain became the great and powerful Oz.”

Over the years, Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Fisher had a relationship as conflicted and layered as any other mother-daughter story in show business, but with an ending that they might think implausible, or even sentimental, had they read it in a script. First Ms. Fisher died on Tuesday, of heart attack at 60; a day later, her mother, 84, succumbed to heart failure of her own, although technically she was likely felled by a stroke.

There is something about celebrity mother-daughter acts like the one lived by Ms. Fisher and Ms. Reynolds that capture the imagination in a way that famous father-sons simply do not. Think of Kris Jenner and the Kardashian sisters, Joan and Melissa Rivers, Judy and Liza. Even the most narcissistic of movie-star mothers seem to have enough psychic energy to love a child passionately, or at least to include the daughter, a younger version of herself, in the realm of things emotionally essential.

As glitzy or extreme as their lives are, those mother-daughters represent, in the push and pull of their relationship, something familiar to so many other mothers and daughters, something they recognize in their own lives: the turn-taking in the role of caregiver, the pleasure and suffocation that comes with being worried over. Whose turn is it to watch? Whose turn is it to be watched?

Ms. Fisher characterizes her memoir as just one more “pathetic bid” for the attention she did not receive as a young child. Ms. Fisher, it turns out, has plenty of distracting sparkle of her own: With humor, her writing tap dances around her relationship with her mother, whom she describes (twice) as “eccentric” and whose troubled marriages Ms. Fisher mines for comic material. She and her mother were both clever, heads-held-high victims of those laughably imperfect men.

But the public’s impression of the mother-daughter pair was probably more fully formed, fairly or not, by the film “Postcards from the Edge,” the script of which Ms. Fisher adapted from her autobiographical novel of the same name. The daughter in that film, played by Meryl Streep, clearly resents her self-involved movie-star mother, who infantilizes but also cares fiercely for her while she is in recovery.

In one complicated scene, the mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, steals the show at a party supposedly thrown in her daughter’s honor. We see a momentary flash of loathing on her daughter’s face, which gives way — quickly — to admiration, even pure joy, in the song her mother performs for the crowd. She is her mother’s biggest fan, as only a child can be. When they are offstage, she is also her toughest critic, as only a child can be.

Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Fisher took their mother-daughter show on the road, performing together in nightclub acts from the time Ms. Fisher was very young, and then performing again, in some version, on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in 2011. In a lengthy interview, they spoke of their trials, including a decade-long period in which Ms. Reynolds claimed, dramatically, that they did not speak. “We talked, really badly,” Ms. Fisher clarified. She explained that at the time, she needed to separate — “to forge some kind of character out of … nothing,” she said, her famous wit momentarily leaving her.

In “Postcards from the Edge,” the middle-aged actress is still asking her mother: “Why do you have to completely overshadow me?” But on Oprah, and also in her own life, Ms. Fisher more than held her own, playing a tough, smart-talking princess in “Star Wars”: She, too, was an icon of her time, and she, too, was not quite of this world.

If her mother was forever an ingénue, albeit one who could land a wicked zinger, Ms. Fisher was a blazing comic, a teller of truths with little patience for costume and cover-up. From what she called “nothing,” she forged something big and bold and every bit as brilliant as the woman who raised her, less glittering, more glaring. Mothers and daughters who watched them on Oprah saw a mutuality in their regard for one another, and reconciliation in their rapport. There was humor and acceptance — not so much a fairy-tale ending as a loving truce, bound by devotion.

For the entirety of her childhood, Ms. Fisher had to endure the public’s fascination with her mother, an experience she felt most keenly when they went out in public. “I did not like sharing her,” Ms. Fisher wrote in “Wishful Drinking.” But toward the end of her mother’s life — Ms. Fisher did not know it was toward the end of her own life, as well — she wanted to show the world the person whom she saw, the mother and human, the Oz behind the curtain whom she loved.

That was one reason, Ms. Fisher said, that she consented to having a documentary made about them both, called “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds,” which will be broadcast on HBO on Jan. 7. At times, one of the documentary’s directors, Fisher Stevens, was frustrated by just how hard it was to capture the real Ms. Reynolds — sometimes, he told The Washington Post, she asked for her lines, and seemed incapable of dropping a performer’s pretense in front of the camera; one interview concludes with her throwing a kiss, as if she were ending a telethon. Ms. Reynolds, offstage, was a gift she reserved for her daughter and family alone.

On the Oprah special, Ms. Reynolds said of her daughter, “I always feel, as a mother does, that I protect her. Who will do that when I’m gone?” she asked.

And yet at the end, it was the daughter who protected the mother, hovering over her, in the documentary, when Ms. Reynolds insists on performing despite obvious frailty. Ms. Fisher brings her mother meals, begs her to rest, agonizes over logistics so Ms. Reynolds could comfortably accept a lifetime achievement award she was receiving from the Screen Actors Guild in 2015.

When her was daughter was unexpectedly gone, on Tuesday, Debbie Reynolds perhaps felt, at some level, that the show that mattered most was over. When she exited the stage a day later, it was her last and most exquisite bit of showmanship — a performance surely of love.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: In and Out of the Spotlight, a Mother-Daughter Act for the Ages. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe